The FileMaker® Pro Recover.log

"What's the meaning of all these log entries? What to do?"

Does it tell me more than "The File is Damaged", maybe something useful?

To make it clear: you should not use a recovered file. Recovering is a very rigid process and you can't tell exactly what parts of a file may have been removed due to errors in the structure. But Recover of a file with an unknown state produces a Recover.log that may contain valuable information about the file.

Unfortunately a detailled explanation of all the entries is still missing. To shed some light on it I set up this page. Remember, this is work in progress and any comments are welcome.

Here is an example recover log. The "no error" parts have been stripped out to concentrate on the errors:

The Log Header:

The colums to the left are: date (ISO format), process time up to the millisecond, offset from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the filename, a recover error code, and some explanetory text, like the filename and the number of pages within the file (1 page = 4096 bytes).

A harmless Error that may be ignored:

One of the most frequent errors reported are related to layouts. Whenever you read "Rebuilt group with X object(s)..." you may ignore it. The background for this message is that a group of layout elements as a whole does not exactly match the extension of the individual elements. To avoid this error message in the Recover.log, go to the layout in question, select one group after the other, ungroup and regroup again, which automatically corrects the dimensions of the group. Admitted, it may be some work to do so, especially on a complicated layout.
But nevertheless if you don't follow this procedure, the file works just as well in FM 11.

not analysed:

Would need an undamaged and the damaged version to analyse. But it looks like that not all graphic elements existed that were somehow referenced. I speculate this could cause crashes in the unrecovered file.

The Report Summary:

Nothing appears to be seriously damaged - possibly missing layout elements are not detectable.
The resulting file size is not smaller than the original: 248213504 bytes > 60309 * 4096 (247025664)
The difference in size is due to the allocation of the elements among the file's pages.